Author
Topic: Thumbnail / Cover-Art. (Read 5268 times)

I got a couple of music videos, would it be possible to automatically add a thumbnail to those, e,g after let's say 20sec out in the movie?Would take time to do this automatically, and if i'd upgrade the media-library i'd allways have to add this manually.

I agree with Thom - whatever the source material videos or DVDs, it doesn't change the fact that randomly choosing a frame an arbitrary number of seconds into the media file is going to generate thumbnails that are far more often useless than useful!

I think it would create screen clutter that would be meaningless, and annoy far more people than it would help. The ugly text may not be pretty, but at least its consistent and doesn't confuse the eye.

fine, If you don't like auto thumbnail. How bout giving the same option to take a thumbnail from an orbitor that there is on the media director. without having to interrupt the video of course.

Hi,

one option is to use Make Thumbnail or something like that under UI2 (I'm not sure if UI1 has that option)....

I disagree on auto thumbnail feature. Kids have no problem recognizing automatically created thumbnails for cartoons and me too - specially cause movie titels are pretty unreadable if you have bright bakcground on UI2 with alpha blending. I think that auto thumbnail is better than no thumbnail... User can correct auto thumbnails with above feature later if he wants...

you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department

I do have a question though.. as I've used linuxmce, mythtv and xbmc/linux and they all have different methods of retrieving cover art... both xbmc and mythtv use imdb for movie info and cover art... both seem to work much better than what you get from amazon with linuxmce..

The method that xbmc uses is by far the best.. (please don't say, "then use xbmc").. anyway, once you setup a video source, you set content (select Movies for example), then choose where you want to retrieve the info from (there are several different ones, I only use imdb) then it scans the entire directory and updates all the matches automatically... Of my approximately 600 movies, I would say it matches about 85% correctly.. about 5% incorrectly and then it leaves about 10% blank... the good part, is that you can change the coverart directly from the UI, and that manual process of fixing the ones that are incorrect works 99.9% of the time... so, I guess my question is, why not use imdb as an option, and be able to update coverart and info directly from the UI?

changing to do cover art from imdb would be a relatively simple fix for the web admin.

However, there is a mechanism that you guys aren't aware of as well... the External Media Identifier.

the EMI is called when discs are inserted into your DVD drive, either audio or DVD video.

The disc's fingerprint is calculated, and results are sent off to Windows Media Services (yes..), and a resulting cover art is retrieved, along with data for chapters, tracks, etc. There is currently not a free service out there that does this.

As for updating cover art on the GUI, we have to be very careful about adding user facing complexity. With the web admin, all administration functions are clearly separated from USING the system, and it should stay this way... With that said, the web admin needs some serious rewriting, retrofitting, etc.. Thanks Jondecker76 for working on this!

As for updating cover art on the GUI, we have to be very careful about adding user facing complexity. With the web admin, all administration functions are clearly separated from USING the system, and it should stay this way... With that said, the web admin needs some serious rewriting, retrofitting, etc.. Thanks Jondecker76 for working on this!

-Thom

I understand about keeping complexity away from the UI.. I don't feel like the method xbmc uses is too "in your face" though.. for example, to actually view the movie info, you press Info on the MCE remote which pulls up the actual movie info, then there is a button at the bottom of the screen to rescan.. you also have the option to change the name of the movie for the lookup from the remote and an on-screen keyboard that pops up.. then, a list of matches comes up, you select the appropriate one, and it's done..

Not difficult at all.. and I feel almost a necessity for any media center solution.